Most of us remember the feeling of exhilaration battling with a touch of apprehension when we felt the car fire up for our first solo run.

The family vehicle pulled into the street as it had so many times before, but now we weren’t passengers or supervised student drivers. We were in control and felt as though we’d made the ranks of adulthood.

One of the first things many of us did, at least in my experience, was set the radio. None of Dad’s news or Mom’s easy listening. We found the popular music channel and cranked up the volume.

One of life’s coincidences brought on a double dose of nostalgia last week when Davy Jones of The Monkees died on the same day that WABB ceased decades as the local standard bearer of pop music.

Thousands of young people were introduced to Davy, Peter, Mike, Peter and Mickey on television. Many local kids listened to “I’m a Believer,” “Last Train to Clarksville” and “Daydream Believer,” in their cars on WABB and other stations.

Before WABB went to FM, the music might have been interrupted by static.

The station was AM, 1480, before the FM version was introduced in 1973. Before that, the signal faded as you got farther from Mobile.

The AM signal was never a certainty. If conditions were right, you could pick up more distant stations, such as WTIX. The music was the same, but a New Orleans station seemed more exotic.

At night, signal power was cut back and you might not get anything except clear channel stations in places like Little Rock and Memphis.

Whatever you could pick up, however faintly, that music was your anthem, the sound of your generation.

It might have been The Monkees in the 1960s, Duran Duran 20 years later or Lady Gaga more recently, but it was part of your identity. Your friends listened to it and it annoyed your parents.

Years later, you might admit an unpleasant secret to yourself. A friend summed it up at a high school reunion. “Do you realize how much of the music we listened to was garbage (or a word to that effect)?”

To continue the ’60s comparison, for every “Yesterday” by the Beatles on the radio, the airwaves were filled with dozens of songs like “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

At the time, it didn’t always matter. We were young and our tastes were not always the most mature.

What mattered was the feeling we had listening to it. We were young, riding with our friends on the road to a bright future. The radio provided the theme music to happiness and independence.

Last week, many of us thought about that feeling as we tuned into Top-40 music on a station for the last time or watched old videos of The Monkees.

Many of those songs wouldn’t make the list of top music of all time. They might not be what we listen to now, at least not unless we’re feeling nostalgic.

But people like The Monkees and all the DJs who spun records and later tapes and CDs on WABB and other stations made their mark in countless memories.

The music does remind us of the moment when the world held limitless promise. We set out on the road to the future with our eyes on the bright horizon and the volume cranked up.